Mardi Gras in Cajun Country

Imagine the following scenario: a large group of country-folk dressed in colorful, fringed, homemade costumes. Drinking has begun at 7am (or earlier if the party happened to be spilling over from the party of the night before). All the revelers, called “Mardi Gras”, are packed onto trailers or on horseback and then travel out to farms or houses in the countryside. Once at the houses, the costumed revelers begin to dance and sing songs in an ancient style of French, begging the farmer for ingredients for a communal gumbo. The farmer lets them dance, watching from the porch of his house. Occasionally a dancer will break from the festivities and in a great show of begging, grovel at the feet of the farmer or pull at the pant legs of one of the onlookers. The capitain, whose job it is to keep all the participants in line, makes a great show of mock-whipping the transgressor and shoving him or her back into the dancing melee. After some time, the farmer produces a chicken from a sack on the porch and throws it in the air. Suddenly, the Mardi Gras stop dancing. They break into a wild run in pursuit of the chicken, tripping over each other in their haste. The chase can last for several minutes as the Mardi Gras climb trees, jump over bushes and leap over fences in order to catch the chicken. On one occasion, I even saw a Mardi Gras crawl into a storm drain in pursuit of an especially wily bird.
Sheer madness, I tell you.

After Cajun Country, we arrived in the Big Easy, New Orleans. We managed to find a furnished apartment at a pretty good price in the Garden District and get relatively familiar with our surroundings. Next up dreaded job hunt...

The weather has been spectacular (although, for some reason, everyone has been complaining about how cold it is...boo hoo, it's only 55 degrees. We were just ecstatic that the temperatures were above freezing!) The trees and telephone wires were still draped with beads from the recent New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations giving everything along the parade routes a jeweled, Christmasy appearance.